Livestreamed on May 29th, 2021 

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Full Transcript:

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Robert Diaz: 

We're living and inhabiting Indigenous lands and shores, the planet's largest gathering of freshwater. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron Wendat, the Haudenosaunee and the Métis, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Today, the meeting place on Tkaronto is home to many Indigenous people from across Turtle Island. And we are grateful to have the opportunity to work in and enter into respectful and caring relations and community on this territory. I'd like to begin also by thanking not only our panelists today, but everyone else who's spoken for the entire day, I invite you to watch the video, the videos that have been posted on our website, at Scholar Strike Canada.ca. And also to remind folks that we have another full day's events tomorrow on the website as well. The other thing I'd like to ask folks to do is that, this, this event is being live streamed on Facebook, and on YouTube. And so if you have any questions, comments, please do so place them in the chat function. And our tech folks and also our, some audience members will key me into those and I'll make sure to incorporate them into the dialogue, the vibe that I'm trying to invoke, right we're trying to invoke as a conversation as a teacher and we're quite limited by our means virtually, but we will try to echo right the energy that has been present today with multiple dialogues and panels. 

 

Before I begin, I'd like to introduce the panelists for today and they will be speaking in this order. 

 

Takashi Fujitani is the Dr. David Chiu Professor and Director of Asia Pacific Studies at the University of Toronto. Much of his past and current research has centred on the intersections of nationalism, colonialism, war, memory, racism, ethnicity, and gender, as well as the disciplinary and area studies boundaries that have figured our ways of studying these issues. He is the author of Splendid Monarchy and Race for Empire: Koreans as Japanese and Japanese as Koreans in WWII. 

 

Casey Mecija is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies, and holds a PhD from Jewish Studies at York University and holds a PhD from University of Toronto. Her current research theorizes sounds made beyond Filipinx diaspora to make an argument about a “queer sound” that permeates diasporic sensibilities..Her work has been published in queer in Asian America and diasporic intimacies queer Filipinos and Canadian imaginaries. 

 

Allan Punzalan Isaac is Associate Professor of American Studies and English at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is the author of American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America and a book we're very excited to read soon, Filipino Time: Affective Worlds and Contracted Labor.

 

Lucy Burns is an Associate Professor at UCLA's Asian American Studies Department. She's the author of Puro Arte: On the Filipino Performing Body published by NYU press. She's also a dramaturg, whose recent collaborations include David Rousseve’s Stardust, and R. Zamora Linmark’s But, Beautiful, and TeAda Productions’ Global Taxi Drivers’ Project. 

 

Christine Kim is Associate Professor and editor of the journal Canadian Literature. Her teaching and research focus on Asian North American literature and theory, Canadian literature, diaspora studies, and cultural studies. She is the author of The Minor Intimacies of Race and co-editor of Cultural Grammars of Nation, Diaspora and Indigeneity.

 

So before we begin, I will start by talking about, how do we enter this conversation? And what are the grounds with which this event was thought about, in the context of the organizers in the collective? I wanted to convene this particular roundtable as a means to activate a grounded, personal and meaningful way for folks to encounter possible models for imagining what social engagement, political commitment and their collective imagining around what undoing anti-Asian racism could look like, or feel, or mean, particularly for those of us working with or engaging with educational institutions or settings. The folks who have agreed to speak today, from a very personal level, have been truly inspirational to me, they've been mentors and interlocutors and people that I've seen as allies and discussions right around these issues. And I thought, an informal conversation where we just share where we're coming from might be a good thing. 

 

You know, one of the things that frustrates me in particular around Asian Canadian Studies, both as a field and politics, if you were to think about its present moment within institutions, isn't it always seems to be defanged and depoliticized across multiple fronts, from people that lead these spaces on campuses, to gestures around empty and quite harmful ideals and multiculturalism and identity politics, to failure to naming racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other forms of oppression, to thinking about Asian Canadian identities experiences comparatively, to mobilizing it in ways that are accountable to the demands of students or activists and community members, to supporting the demands of the community, as you asked for in dream certain things, to being accountable to the forms and dreams that our demands take, especially when institutions limit their scope by offering resources or denying them to the communities and stories and experiences that the field itself privileges or deprioritizes. 

 

Today I want to begin our conversation by invoking the previous conversations before that gave me faith and hope what Asian Canadian thinking and being alongside with others can look like. I want to name Rajean Hoilett, Beverly Bain, Shellie Zhang, Min Sook Lee, Richard Fung, Monika Gagnon, Lu Xu, Mei Chiu, Maribeth Tabernera, Kirstin Emiko McAllister, Angie Wong, Jayal Chung, Deena Ladd, and Winnie Ng. What we witnessed today in their conversations, and for those who have not been a part of it, please look at them, listen to them, I invoke their names because I engage with them, and actually want to challenge colleagues and coteachers in institutions in Canada, feminist and otherwise. You know, recently I just pulled out of an advisory board of a national council to think about anti-Asian-Canadian racism. And, in that advisory board there are folks or feminist faculty members, folks secure in their position. I invoke the names and the creativity, especially of the youth that spoke today, because they are often so creative, and imaginative, but do not have access to the spaces of power that we do. Right? Especially if we have security of a job that many folks do not have. 

 

So I invite you, colleagues, friends, to be accountable to their dreams, experiences, creativity, joys and struggles, because we can, and we can do it. Righ?. And I myself, having been deeply moved to this kind of this reciprocal accountability that I've received from the folks in this room, this virtual room. And on that note, although it has only come to the fore now in anti-Asian, so this notion of anti-Asian racism seems to like all of a sudden, come to the fore in the context of COVID. You know, it's actually existed for far longer. So I'd like to invite the panel to speak about, if you can speak more about how anti-Asian racism has informed how you engage with institutions, or sought to transform them from your own personal experiences? Can you share some stories around how you came to learn about, teach or center, the experience of Asian and other marginalized communities and their work within or beyond institutional settings? And let's begin with Tak.

 

Takashi Fujitani: 

Okay, thank you very much, Robert, for your message, and the hope that you always bring to everything I have to say. And I want to acknowledge that I feel very privileged and grateful to live and work on the traditional territory of many Indigenous nations, including the Mississaugas of the Credit, the Anishnaabe, the Haudenosaunee, the Huron Wendat peoples, and that this area is still home to many diverse Indigenous, Inuit and Métis people today. I'd also like to thank the organizers of this event for bringing us all together and for inviting me to participate. And I couldn't help but also want to say that as a faculty member of the University of Toronto, I'd like to affirm my commitment to supporting the CAUT censure of our university and the law school for their mishandling of the recent attempt to hire professor Azarova. And I also understand why the organizers of this event decided that in the spirit of censure, they would like to decline my offer, as director of the two program in Asia Pacific studies to co-sponsor this event. In fact, I'm, I'm kind of grateful for that because I would like to then write in my annual report, that our sponsorship was turned down in the spirit of the censure. So I'm here as an individual faculty member who is a supporter of this event and the censure. 

 

So I've learned a lot so much from the previous panels, and in fact, frankly, not sure how much I can contribute. But I thought I'd take my time to talk about my own involvement in anti-racist activism and research within the context of the split, or actually, the non-relation between Asian Studies and Asian American studies, as well as the mid early to mid-1990s assault on affirmative action that took place in California where I spent most of my career. So as I say, I spent almost my entire academic career in California, first at UC Santa Cruz, starting in 1988. It's been a long time. Then UC San Diego, before leaving San Diego and taking up a position in Japan where I almost stayed, I had an opportunity to do that. But then coming to Toronto in 2011, with again, great hopes of learning from a new environment, which I have. So we're asked to talk about our own background. To some extent, I kind of wanted to historicize myself, I guess, in a way, and talk about my location within the discursive spaces of Asian and Asian American Studies. 

 

But growing up in Berkeley, California, I had been sensitive by racism ever since I can remember, and I recently gave some thought to thinking about how there was a great contradiction between the apparent universalism and humanism of the campus on a hill in Berkeley, and then the deeply divided racialized city that I actually grew up in. But anyway, my first job was in UC Santa Cruz. And there I joined some other Asian American colleagues, mostly staff, really, and a few faculty, in a number of struggles against anti-Asian racism, and for more Asian American Studies in the curriculum. But I have to say that I couldn't incorporate the study of race and racism in the United States, into my own research until a few years after I had begun teaching. And this is because of the formation of disciplines and the formation of area studies in particular. I was trained to be a historian of Japan, and had been a critic of Japanese nationalism, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, and so forth. But the historical non-relation between areas such an Ethnic Studies have created a kind of invisible barrier to scholars like me, who have been educated in Asian Studies, but who wish to do more research and teaching on racism in the United States. For me, this changed a lot in the early to mid-1990s. With the rising tide of racism in California, especially was the reactionary attack on affirmative action that was actually led by the University of California and its regents. And I was glad to see that Robert also mentioned this a little bit in the in the first segment of the day,

 

I felt extreme discomfort and even some ridiculousness, as I wrote and critiqued Japanese racism, nationalism, or forgetfulness about Japanese atrocities, and colonial colonialism, an ocean away, even though I was witnessing American racism, nationalism just outside my window, and in my own Department of History at UC San Diego. I became much more involved in anti-racist activism as a faculty member of UC San Diego, and I served on many affirmative action and diversity committees within UCSD and the University of California system, and became part of an anti-racist coalition of faculty at UCSD. I also then began to incorporate the critique of US racism and imperialism into my own research and writing. My amazing colleagues at UC San Diego particularly in Ethnic Studies, Literature, and History, helped me to find a way to go against the conventions of the discipline of History, as water as well as the bordering practices of the university, that cordoned off Asian studies from Asian American Studies. But I also need to add that we did not at that time wish to privilege Asians over any other racialized group. In fact, we were more driven at that time by the upsurge in racism against black, brown and undocumented. And I will always be grateful for that experience. 

 

As many people have pointed out, by now, Ethnic Studies emerged out of the Third World Liberation Front in the Third World Studies movement in the late 1960s and early 70s, in the San Francisco Bay Area, so in exactly the place that I grew up, and it also had a strong international and global perspective. But in the process of the institutionalization of Ethnic Studies in higher education, that moment of transnationalism receded to the background while we witnessed the increasing nationalization or Americanization of the Ethnic Studies formation. We're seeing again a resurgence of the transnational in Ethnic Studies, which is a great thing. So, when we're considering the emergent formation of Asian Canadian Studies today, I think it's really important not to let the name “Canadian” establish the nation's borders as the boundaries of the possible. As for Asia Studies in the academy, it had precursors in state and military intelligence communities during World War Two, but became firmly entrenched in the Cold War years in order to contain communism. In the process of the institutionalization of Asian Studies in Asian American Studies, this had completely different characteristics, and were in many ways at odds with each other. Asian Studies was well funded by the state and multinational corporate interests, while its privileged faculties disavowed any relation to Asian American communities. In fact, many of the key persons in Asian Studies treated Asian Americans with racist disdain, even exploiting them as language instructors, while acting as if they had made themselves into great scholars. In contrast, Asian American Studies was poorly funded, and had only a precarious existence in the university. It also had a completely different relationship to Asian American communities since its faculty and students can join activism in Asian American communities with work within the university. Asian Studies was primarily about white people, studying people of color, except for a smattering of Asians who were often treated more like native informants and scholars; while Asian American Studies faculty were primarily Asian American and emerged organically out of their communities. A different way of saying this is that Asian Studies and Asian American Studies emerged as differentially racialized knowledge formations. Globalization and demographic changes have produced more Asian scholars in Asian Studies, and have impacted Canada and some institutions on the west coast of the US most clearly. But in other major centers of North American area studies, not as much has changed as one might think and hope.

 

So I want to end by saying something about Eurocentrism in relationship to Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. So I've been critiquing the politics around the split between Asian Studies and Asian American Studies. But we need to understand it's not enough to create bridges across Asian and Asian American Studies, even though this may be an important step. We also need to intervene at the heart of the university and critique Eurocentrism if we hope not only to decolonize knowledge production, but to engage in anti-racist work that has brought relevance across all people of color, and Indigenous peoples. Eurocentrism is not only about making the physical location of Europe the center of the world, it is about whiteness, and white supremacy. When we critique Eurocentrism, we're not saying there are too many studies of black Germans, or Africans, and Muslims in France, or Asians in Britain or the Netherlands and so on. If we're going to work against racism and decolonize the university, we need to ally with other people of color and Indigenous peoples to critique Eurocentrism with an understanding that this formation anchors the university's racism. Eurocentrism today is part of what I have tried to theorize as polite racism, or what Said once called casual racism. It is a racism that looks at you with a friendly face and denies itself as racist. It promises inclusion under the banner of universalism, and humanism, often while secret deals are made amongst white boys. But it privileges whiteness without asking for sacrifice from those people. It does so without calling it the racism that it is. And it supplies the racist fuel, this casual, polite racism, that fuels the type of vulgar racism that too often ends in the sheer violence that we are witnessing too often. So I'll end here. Thank you.

 

Robert Diaz: 

Thank you Tak. So much to think about, difference is really racialized. Especially and I think just even doing that map, and I'm really thankful and it's helpful for us to think about. I believe our next is Casey.

 

Casey Mecija: 

So thank you Takashi for such a rich historical overview of Asian Studies and Asian American Studies and for importantly highlighting the urgency of problematizing Eurocentrism. So, I'm Casey, I'm also located in the area known as Tkaronto, which has been caretaken by the Anishnawbek nation, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the Huron Wendat. It is now home to many First Nations, Inuit and Métis communities. I'd like to thank the organizing committee of this event for bringing us together, and thank you to my fellow panelists. Your work has been deeply inspiring, and I feel very lucky to be in conversation with you today. 

 

So Robert asked us to offer stories as a way of animating today's discussion and I have a couple to share with you. So my subjectivity has been formed by intimate proximities to first and second generation Filipinx community, to my early encounters with black music and cultural production through family gatherings. And via the playlists of my older and much cooler Filipinx aunties and kuyas, from Toronto and Southern California. The neighborhoods that my family occupied, for example, Carson City, California, is full of Filipinx, black and Latinx people. Similarly, my experience of spending time in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, as a child, was full of encounters with different diasporic racialized people living and exchanging food, music stories, and everyday socialities. Those physical and emotional geographies were in stark contrast to the city in which I lived and spent my time growing up. 

 

I was born in a primarily white suburb in southern Ontario called Brantford. In this small city, I was explicitly aware of my difference, especially as a racialized queer teenager, a time in my life when high school uniforms attempted to flatten style and emphasize sameness, and where the celebratory rhetoric of Canadian multiculturalism was often mobilized by my friendly-faced white teachers to evade the harshness of racism and homophobia that landed on my body and the bodies of my family members in mundane and sometimes spectacular ways. 

 

So to combat the isolation, and in retrospect, racial melancholia that I experienced as a young person, I decided to establish a committee, of which I was self-proclaimed, and self-nominated as president, called Race Relations. Working alongside a handful of Korean, Iranian, Pakistani and Chinese students, we organized a conference affectionately called Motivation for the Nation. And while my younger self often succumbed to the trappings of the promise of the nation, and accommodationist approaches to anti-Asian and anti-racist activism, like this conference, that sought to bring social change through a deeply racist institutional structure. The kernel of that collaborative experience, coupled with the neighborhoods that inform my sensorial and psychic memory, were so formative to how I imagine undoing anti-Asian racism now, as an adult mired in the university system. As Robert alluded to, the way I imagined the work of anti-Asian racism is the work of thinking alongside others. It is deeply relational and is committed to collaborating and thinking across different spaces of diaspora to bring Asian Canadian Studies, Filipinx Diaspora Studies, Black Studies and Critical Race Studies more broadly into conversation. I've always believed that anti-Asian racism activism is a commitment to coalitional work that takes many recognizable forms like Motivation for the Nation. But I also know that some effective modes of resistance slip from the logics of legibility, and emerged at the level of the effective and the intimate. 

 

So my entry into engaging with anti-Asian racism has two major flashpoints that occurred outside of the institution. One emerges from my childhood, and the other from my encounters as a touring musician. My parents never taught me Tagalog as a child. I can recall my feelings of discomfort when met with the sounds and intonations of a language I was so familiar with, but did not understand. I now consider my parents’ hesitation towards teaching me Tagalog as a strategy of protecting me from racism. My childhood home was filled with sounds that gestured to an elsewhere that my parents in many ways tried to protect me from. The sonic substance of this experience can be threaded through to my work as the lead singer of an orchestral pop band called Oh, Bijou! In my time as a musician, my Filipinx body was often described by the media and music critics as producing a “multicultural” sound. My Asianness was a discernible sonic signifier. My Filipinx presence was rendered by audience members in benevolent ways. For example, one audience member commented on how our music produced a “rather impressive Asian sound”. So these moments were sticky, and I carry them with me into my institutional work. 

 

Now, how do I undo the sadness and dispirited ness caused by anti-Asian racism, but undoubtedly pools and myself my racialized colleagues and students? My classrooms are spaces that privilege storytelling, like this panel, and all its sensorial forms. My students are encouraged to use aesthetic expression as a way of connecting themselves and each other to the material they are encountering. I want my students to feel like their lives are epistemological resources, regardless of institutional affiliation and recognition. They write poems, they record videos, they make music and art. And in the last class I taught on diaspora, they shared family recipes, and if we were together, we would have eaten those recipes together. In one of my lectures, I bring music into my class and sometimes I sing for my students. Recently, I sang a song for them that is about my parents’ trans-Pacific migration, and my queer diasporic experience. Some students cried, some located themselves in my vulnerability, and others appeared absolutely ambivalent. But my offering of the affective and intimate was a hopeful gesture, made with the recognition that these other ways of learning hold political possibilities and potential. I hope that in this song, they could feel the layers of my history that I recalled for you earlier. My students encounter difference through affect of attachment, which I hope opens them up to a sense of understanding of politics of social justice.

 

Robert Diaz: 

Thank you, Casey, thank you for the pedagogic intervention as well, it's very useful for us to think about. Allen?

 

Allan Punzalan Issac: 

Thank you so much, Robert. And thank you to the panelists for sharing the space with all of us and sharing your thoughts. And I want to just follow along with the stories about three stages, uneven stages of my life, the 80s 90s and the 2000s. And so just to start off, I was born in Manila, but grew up in Jersey City, New Jersey, I teach at Rutgers New Brunswick, and like Casey in New Jersey City, in the way she described, where she was growing up with aunts and uncles, it was indeed a plurality, which is to say that these are like physical proximities as well as what you say, affective and cultural geographies and affinities. 

 

So in one sense, either folks were either immigrants, black, or white ethnics. But specifically white ethnics, they didn't see themselves as white, but they saw themselves as Jewish, Italian or Irish, for example. And then among African Americans, of course, there was distinctions that I learned coming to America that there were, of course, African Americans, and then Caribbean Blacks. And then of course, there were the Indians who are Indian Indians, but then there are also Guyanese Indians, and Indians from the Caribbean. So that was Jersey City for me. That's what what, what what I grew up in as a plurality, or majority minority space. And that was interesting is because I didn't have to identify necessarily as Asian. So I wanted to put that first that, in fact, the affinity and the physical proximity was with Puerto Ricans. 

 

And so precisely because of the cultural affinities and the culture commonalities - even names, even like the way by which you know, how much they hated each other in one neighborhood, but yet they dated each other nonetheless - these are all ways by which I knew there was an affinity, but I didn't realize it was historical affinity, that is to say, US empire, which, which is what articulated both our existences in Jersey City, New Jersey, USA. And that later found itself into my dissertation when I went to graduate school. 

 

And so here we are, in the mid-90s, and the comparative literature program at NYU. And what was interesting here was, I was interested because traditional comparative literature was founded to compare literally, European national literatures, right? As if nations had boundaries that were so clear. But what interested me was precisely boundaries that were not so clear, when we're talking about US empire. Right. And so these unclear borders is what fascinated me. And of course, during the 90s was also the postcolonial turn within Comparative Literature and in World Literature. And for me, my allies in the program were Caribbeanist, and Africanist, which I thought was really productive conversations across regions, when we're talking about unclear borders and boundaries. And so that's why even Comparative Literature, traditionally a very European and Eurocentric, as you say, Tak, Eurocentric endeavor, in fact, because traditionally, you learn French and German. But there was this switch over in which other languages had to be known. And I wanted to study, interestingly, the US American Studies, but transnationally. What did it mean to actually have sub-nations? Right, and that certainly speaks to Canada in the way they understand race histories through Indigenous histories, which I think the United States really has - American scholars really have to learn more from, the commonality of settler colonialism as such. 

 

And so this conversation, stemming from Jersey City, where there were immigrants of different sorts, as well as those who actually came under US empire that then later immigrated. Therefore, there are different types of immigrants, right? The histories of immigration and immigrants were all varied within Jersey City. And then the way that borders were erased and redrawn are also quite different. Postcolonial is not postcolonial is not postcolonial. Empires is not empire is not empire. But in fact, those are the things that we had to distinguish and discern when we were in graduate school. And as I said before, the alliances that I formed with Caribbeanists and Africanists is that we might share the same language, but of course, it is different histories that we're talking about, theoretically, can speak the same thing. But of course, the historical and material a relations are quite distinct. And that's something that is very important lesson that I continue to learn in my career as a professor then in this in this industry. 

 

So skip into the 2000s now, teaching at Rutgers. So here, I'm co-directing at Global Asias Initiative. And this speaks to what Tak was saying about the non-relation, or the rather oftentimes fictive relationship between Asian American Studies and Asian Studies, and I would add, Asian Diaspora Studies. And I'll qualify that in a second. So what's interesting is that because the groundwork had been laid, when I was chairing the Department of American cities, I made sure that the interdisciplinary studies like American Studies had very intimate and close relationship to the other smaller interdisciplinary departments, like Africana, like Latino and Caribbean studies, Women's and Gender Studies. Because these are all programs at that point, at least at Rutgers, except Women's Studies, that do not have graduate programs. But also because they're small, and they are this interdisciplinary study, tend to be made invisible, in the larger School of Arts and Sciences. 

 

But the creation of the Global Asias Initiative was actually bringing together folks, younger scholars, particularly, who work in Asian Studies that are working against the Cold War in areas studies model, right? Seeing the way by which Asian Studies is, can be thought of differently as a region, for example, Indian Ocean is a region that we can study within Asian Studies. Or the Americas is actually part of the way you can imagine Asian and Asian Diaspora Studies, and also folks who work in Asian American Studies that see that network transnationally. So there are ways by which we can understand Asia as a region quite differently from the way it was imagined in the Cold War era. 

 

In fact, one of the things I think that among the Asian Americanists and Critical Asian Studies Scholars, is particular terms. Like for example, racism is in fact a category by which we can study like different Asian regions as well as Asian America. Ethno-nationalism that has emerged, in India, in Burma, or Myanmar, rather, and in the United States and the Philippines, right? Anti-immigrant rhetoric, xenophobia, all those things that I think are really important as categories and as points of analyses that we can share across disciplines. And then I think that's one of the things that we're trying to build in something like the Global Asias Initiative here. And it's thanks to student activism, and I want to go back again to the history that Tak shared with us, that it was really through student activism in the last year and a half, that finally it was speeded up through the curricular committee, the arts and science, and that we finally have an Asian American Studies Minor, starting in September. Like, I've been at Rutgers for 12 years, I've been trying to get some traction with the different programs here and there, with courses, etc, etc, but only now because of student activism, as well as the historical circumstances that we face, the massacre, etc, and all the tragedies that had to happen. And global pandemic had to happen, in a sense, alongside student activism that created institutional and transformations - or at least changes, not quite transformations, that is actually further down along the road, I think. 

 

And so, I do want to just, end with the way that we began, in a sense, that student activism was at root, and the push by students and organizing by graduate students as well, to actually keep the institutional changes going and transformations that continue as a struggle, that actually comes from below, rather than from people giving us anything, whether institutions, because I was waiting for 12 years, and of course, they never gave me anything. But it really was through the efforts of students and allies, in the smaller departments, in Africana, in Latino, and Caribbean studies, really individual scholars and their students who've really pushed for these changes. So I just want to stop there. And thank you.

 

Robert Diaz: 

Thank you, Alan, really reminding us that proximity is also knowledge formation. It's also ways of shaping and transforming institutions, right. It's a thing that can affect us. And that activism is also a form of engagement that, you know - no institution gives marginalized people things like easily. We know Asian American Studies, no Asian Canadian Studies, no Women's Studies, none of these spaces exist, unless people demanded it. The state always says no. You have to ask with that in mind. So thank you for reminding us. Lucy?

 

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns: 

Thank you so much. Thank you, everyone, all this distinguished panel. Really, I want to begin with just expressing how honored I am to be a visitor of this tremendous gathering, organized by the Scholar Strike Canada, entering the gracious invitation of Professor Robert Diaz. I also joined this session from the unceded land of the Gabrielino Tongva peoples, where I work and live. And specifically I'm dialing in and - this is a history I’m  just learning - I'm dialing in from a neighborhood in Los Angeles, California, founded on one of the first expropriated Indigenous lands in California. So this is the ground on which I stand and humbly or sit in front of my computer. So thank you again, for this. I'm really honored, and I'm learning a lot, I've been able to attend other sessions. And it's really energizing for me to be here, and learning from all of you. And thank you also Robert for creating this space. And so that's the spirit I come from, forgive me if I don't end up citing anybody along the way, other than our folks here, and just build from a number of your comments. 

 

So first I'll begin with I'm an immigrant. I came here when I was a teenager here as in the US in California. And I say, I've had very few times where I get to introduce myself this way, probably this is the third time I've been able to do this, is that I come from a family of social workers and sex workers. And so I grew up in the Philippines, where I saw people who were taking care of me kind of raise trouble in their workplaces, right. Whether it's the Philippine National Red Cross a chapter in Olongapo City, or the Pope John this 23rd Community Center also in Olongapo City, or in the beer houses, as we called it, on Magsaysay Street, and their agitations in workplace, also at times cost them their jobs, or gave them the silent treatment from the colleagues, or gained them the respect right from their superiors and peers. So that's kind of where, my consciousness come from as a as a person. 

 

And I also want to say that being in that in where I grew up, who I grew up around, I was always surrounded by conversations about the violence of martial law in the Philippines, the Marcos’ martial law, and also the US military occupation, because I lived in a city or that hosted the US Subic Bay Naval Base. That's Olongapo City as I mentioned. And also, these conversations are always amongst ourselves, the ninos and ninas, whoever was around, around the, really the dependency that we had, as people living in Olongapo, the dependency we had on the US military ships coming in. So that dictated the pulse of the economy, and the economy being depressed or better, and that also related to the mood of the folks, right. But there's also again, always a critical tone to the conversation. It wasn't about acceptance, it was always - even if it's in the form of complaint - it was always about this rub, against what we were having to live with. Okay, so I'll that's the the first part of how I wanted to introduce myself to this conversation. 

 

And then I'll just fast forward to, oh, just a quick thing. So when I ended up going to community college, and then transferred to Cal State, so I’ve come out of public schools all the way of my education. And when I was in college, I wasn't necessarily part of what we understand to be very obvious activist activities, protests or anything like that. I had to put myself through college, I had three jobs. So I didn't have much time to even join student groups. And so whoever I was in relationship with, meaning it was really the people I worked with, right. And so if there was some kind of what I would recognize as some more of an activist action that I participated in, it was through my jobs, it had to be through my jobs because I wasn't really doing anything between the jobs and studying. 

 

So but what I want to bring here in terms of when I was in college, to me, I was being politicized in my education. I was taking courses in third world feminism's postcolonial literatures as an undergraduate student, at Sonoma State University. Yeah, so I can't remember - also African American literature and Irish Renaissance, right. And that was, to me, there was a lot of conversations that was happening in terms of post-coloniality. And like Allen said, the empire is not empire is not empire, or it is, but it's in these forms. Suppose coloniality is different in different forms. And for me, the Philippines that was coming into that conversation, but also Ireland. 

 

So then, let me just move on to, to graduate work to where I did my graduate work at UMass Amherst. That's where I really began more actively participating in these activist movements, that is specific to Asian American Studies, in establishing and thinking about Asian American Studies within higher education. And so I want to also say that I came into the English department, UMass Amherst, and was immediately suddenly - because I was interested in post colonial literature and really how to think about the Philippines within the discourse of post colonial theory. As I arrived there, coming from growing up in the Philippines, so it's the minority station - that has a different texture for me. And then coming to California again, the idea of the questions of belonging, again, has a very different texture for me. And then arriving then, here I am, in the East Coast, and I've never been out there, first time I'm living out there. And it's a very different landscape of neighbors and friends and new colleagues and people to meet. 

 

So as Alan was saying, you that that's where I first learned about - not learned, I've learned about them before - but to actually meet Puerto Ricans for the first time, and Cubans, and say, when I would walk into - I started to work at a place calledNew World Theater. Again, I put myself in graduate school, so I had many jobs. So when I started to work at a place called New World Theatre, it's one of the first and perhaps, in its time, the only theater that's dedicated to for, by and about people of color. And I use that phrase specifically to invoke Dr. Du Bois in the way that he defined African American Theatre in the early 20th Century. It was started by this woman director named Roberta Uno. And so it's really through her I got this training of thinking about theater of the people, by the people, near the people. And I bring that into - eventually approached this idea of whatever we understand to be activism. And, I walk into the office again, with this new configuration of kasama, compadres, and I walk in the room, and I say, “Hey, que pasa,” and everyone be like, “Oh, she's definitely from Southern California.” It's like the thing they didn't say, I guess in Puerto Rico, I'm like, What do you, how do you greet each other? So that was that was, again, talking about proximity, and then I would add that, again, I can continuing then my training in post-colonial theory, in sharing the classrooms with international students in particular, from the global south, and then participating with them in new graduate union activist protest, activities at UMass. 

 

And then also, eventually, after about two years that I was there, there was a group of really energized radical undergraduate students who were really interested in Asian American Studies, and started organizing, both in this, like, taking over buildings that was part of it, and really came up even though we didn't do things like - they thought of like one of the activist actions that they wanted to do was like, take out all the books in the library that has anything to do with Asian American lives and experiences. And then stack that like in front of the administration building to show this at that point, the main question is like, what is Asian American studies? Again, to echo what Professor Fujitani had involved, really, we were with this tension and fricative relationship and distant relationship between Asian American and Asian Studies, that was also a question because every time we brought up Asian American Studies, they were interpreting it as Asian Studies. But it was also for me, really, it was important to not right away, like, let me explain to you what Asian American Studies isn't what and how it's not Asian, right? Because there's a version of that, that could sound racist. And also, in its own way, exclusionary. 

 

So those were the things that we were in terms of the organizing around, how do we think about Asian American Studies in a place like Amherst, where it's not Los Angeles, where it's not New York, there's not this critical mass of a community outside the university. But we certainly had enough agitational folks within the university, who really thought of incredibly creative ways to say, look, we don't have to have a critical mass in these terms of numbers. If this is a knowledge formation that is emerging, this is a way that we can think about this. And so we can talk more about kind of those fun things that we did and how we made those connections. The only other thing that I want to invoke in and then I'll close, and then I can talk about these other things that we ended up doing at UCLA where I actually work now. 

 

The other entity that I wanted to invoke here is Professor Sally Habana-Hafner, who's the other mentor that I put next to Roberta Uno. Sally Habana-Hafner was a lecturer at UMass Amherst. And she's Filipina. She was like, I think the only Filipino faculty member in the mid 90s when I was there. And both Roberta and Sally were lecturers, they weren't in tenure track. So Sally actually started a center called the Center for Immigrant Refugee Leadership and Empowerment. And so that was the other kind of training that I had. And that's how I got connected to more closely with the refugee and children of refugee communities that ended up living in what we call the Happy Haole Valley or Pioneer Valley, that's the other name of it, then that's a colonial name. And then we call it the Happy Haole Valley. So through those kind of two different things, again, the Circle, that's the Center, and the New World Theater. That's the the out of campus activities that I was really taking part of. And I had the opportunity and privilege of kind of bringing together the community that we were working with in Circle, and then the methods and the artists were that we were, who we were hosting at New World Theater together in several projects. Yes, I just wanted to I'll leave it there. And hopefully, there's some things that we can pick up from there. 

 

Robert Diaz: 

Thanks, Lucy, especially, reminding us that raising trouble can start from the very beginning, in our encounters with it and can actually become what Casey calls an epistemological resource for thinking through like other ways of being in institutions that seem to always depoliticize our trouble. You know, so I think we have to think through what that can look like in Maine. Christine?

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